As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is no difficult to imagine a person - a mute Virgil of the corporeal world - who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seem dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special sense of grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.
—John Szarkowski, from “Atget and the Art of Photography,” an essay in The Work of Atget Vol. 1: Old France, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981. Courtesy of Gregory Taylor.
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This is not the poetry of a man who cares nothing for the rich resources of language, but of a man for whom language and the world are deeply involved in each other. George Oppen’s awe at the things of the world is the measure of his scepticism about what man makes of them, socially and mentally, with his ideas and forms of order. For him, there can only be one response to awe:
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity
(“Route”)
The motive ensures that at times his poems seem to be a kind of pointing at things, as if things can be seen through words:
Not to reduce the thing to nothing -
I might at the top on my ability stand at a window and say, look out; out there is the world. (“Route” 3)
But the transparency of words is an illusion, as George Oppen knows. Man is in a world which his language orders or disorders, and he sees India words or is blinded by them.
In “Psalm” George Oppen’s awe at the deer is not conveyed by gesture or by a simple act of naming alone - even the exclamation “That they are there!” is an emotive verbal action. He conveys the otherness of the deer by imaging them “in the strange woods”, in their bodily activities, and in their relationship with the things of their world - grass, roots, earth, woods, fields, leaves, sun. He juxtaposes their world with the words naming it:
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out.
“this in which” is wholly other, and at once local and cosmic, but it is an order of existence, not life as a blind force. The faith is in language and in the world, or in language in the world, in the relationship between the language man has made, and the world he has not made, but shares with the creatures.
George Oppen’s awe belongs, in part, to a specifically American tradition which arose from the experience of the pioneers and settlers, and found literary expression in Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman among others. The tradition apprehends nature with conflicting emotions of wonder and fear. Nature is absolutely other than the human world, a fearful barrier to be overcome, and a savage wilderness, but also the ground which man must tend with care if he is to exist on it; the ground supplying materials which man may adapt with his skills to make a harmonious settlement, and which in misusing he will destroy, and destroy himself. To the latter perception, as well as to his experience as a craftsman, we owe George Oppen’s contactual knowledge of the practical crafts by which men and women make their world, and a poetry that recognises, as fully as any poetry can, the impermanence of human order, and the threat of universal destruction posed by our misuse of knowledge. If there are poems that are equal to the nuclear threat, in the sense of seeing what it means, then George Oppen has written them, in “Time of the Missile” and “Crowded Countries of the Bomb”. The recognition is less a matter of particular poems, however, than of the knowledge of the complete vulnerability uniting us from which George Oppen always writes, and of his understanding that man cannot live without a sense of the future.